High-Rise Pigs is a film by Ang Siew Ching that explores the industrial production of pigs, and how these living, sentient, intelligent beings are turned into commodified meat. Using the Zhongxin Kaiwei Pig Building in China’s Hubei province as a focal point, the work examines the inner workings of a factory farm situated next to a small rural village. At 26 storeys, it is the largest single-building pig farm in the world, with a capacity to slaughter 1.2 million pigs per year. These high-rise farms are China’s response to its demand for pork, the most popular animal protein in the country. The Pig Building here becomes a framework through which technologies of reproduction, mechanisation, and containment are interrogated. 

Blending architectural models, digital imagery, and documentary footage, the work exposes the rationalised systems that control and reconfigure the pig’s tragic life cycle, revealing broader structures that treat animal life as a source for profit. Once the pigs enter the slaughterhouse, they are transformed into commodities, and their deaths become nearly imperceptible through a process of industrialised killing. This system obscures animal suffering, masking violence beneath an aesthetic of efficiency. 

By mirroring this formal opacity in her filmmaking, Ang lays bare the well-hidden, horrific conditions in which millions of animals are kept worldwide and highlights the estrangement of humans from animals under late capitalism. High-Rise Pigs invites viewers to confront the systemic conditions that underpin the annual slaughter of 1.5 billion pigs (China slaughters almost half of these), revealing the industrial infrastructures that render this violence invisible, efficient and routine.